Mitchell's gay art. The male erotic art and drawings of Mitchell and his thoughts about the artists and images that inspire him.
Mitchell's drawings depict 'Men Being Put in Their Place' and explore fetishes such as male bondage, domination and spanking.

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Sunday, 31 August 2014

A-Z of Fetish Artists - Tom of Finland - 3

After
a strange run of experimental subjects, Tom seems to regain his creative focus
in Kake No 10 (Raunchy Truckers). Kake is now working as a truck
driver (no motorbike note!). He returns to his old ways by picking up
an attractive, young hitch-hiker and assertively seducing him in
confines of his cab.

I
have a soft spot for this episode of the saga. The hitch-hiker
scenario has the adventure of uncertainty built into it (probably
more exciting in gay fantasy than reality) and the truck driver
directing his mighty machine always seems the essence of masculinity. The
cab is his private domain, a man-cave where he is in total control,
so Kake does not need to rush the job once the unsuspecting lad is
aboard. He overcomes the initial reluctance of his surprised quarry
with the assistance of his crew-mate, who contains the young man's
initial resistance (above) which inevitably subsides in inverse
proportion to the size of his erection. The struggle is gritty enough
to raise the temperature, but there's not much doubt by the end that
everyone's in the same camp.

The
explicit, athletic sex depicted in these books retains it's power to
excite and arouse to this day. It can even hold it's head up next to
the modern mass of high quality, carefully crafted photographic and
video images of real muscle gods having real sex. But
when this book was published (ca1970), such material did not exist.
Tom's work was hard to find (in the UK police were still routinely
seizing anything explicit), but it was uniquely erotic and the
liberating impact that it had in a fragmented, lonely and still largely
closeted gay world can scarcely be imagined. Tom was not responsible
for this 'Gay Spring' but his early suggestive images in Physique
Pictorial (see Part
1) were among the first snowdrops and this Kake series was a
flowering of unexpected, stunning blooms that confirmed Summer really
was on the way.

Another
innocent is lured into Kake's den at home in the TV Repairman story
(No 11) and I posted the electric 'moment of realisation' from this
story in part 1 (here).
This story has a humorous twist as Kake reveals his TV is not broken
but just unplugged. It makes you wonder, since hunky and incompetent
TV repairmen are not ten a penny, whether Kake's become a stalker.

Service Station

Story
No 12 finds our hero working as a attendant in a Service Station
where the staff (above) have to wear close-fitting overalls. Tom manages to
make them into a very sexy garment (despite the flared legs) and this
is more than enough to kick-start the interest of a motorist who
calls in to fill up.

As an
aside, it's a mystery to me that Tom took so much trouble when he
drew motorcycles but never managed to draw a remotely lifelike
automobile.
.

His excitement when he is is invited in to meet
two more, equally hunky and sexily-clad mechanics can only be
imagined! For me, this modest, uncontroversial four-some (with oil
can) is more successful than the free-for-all in Kake 7.
.

Sight-seeing

After
these two mild, 'carefree sex' stories there's a double-barrelled
treat for fetish fans as Kake re-dons his leather jacket (but not his
motorcycle) for some sight-seeing, taking in the changing of the
guard at what looks like a Central European location. As you would
expect, Kake takes up the time-honoured tourist game of trying to
make the sentry react or smile, forging into new territory with
extreme close-up photography and goosing.
.

Kake Spanked

The aroused sentry gets
into trouble with his superior officer and is looking for pay-back
when Kake reappears near the barracks. The resulting brawl ends with
Kake being spanked, then fucked and even fisted.

It's
quite hard to date the Kake stories but you can see here that we are
at the time when censorship barriers are really starting to fall
around Europe. Tom was taking a degree of risk depicting fetish
elements like fisting here but we shouldn't overstate his role, he
was reliant on and probably motivated by publishers prepared to push
boundaries, they were the real agents of change. Denmark had opened
the door by liberalisation of censorship but there were still legal
uncertainties in the rest of the world where the big money was.
Fortunately global judicial co-operation mechanisms were still unsophisticated but
inevitably the porn publishing field was strewn with unreliable
entrepreneurs and seedy chancers and dealing with them was to lead
Tom, not for the first time in his life, into losses of work and
money at their hands.
.

The Sounding of Kake
The
rough revenge taken by the troopers is seen by their officer and, in
a re-run of Kake's encounter with the police, he is taken into
custody as a trouble-maker, stripped and subjected to a dizzying
succession of fetish punishments and 'tests'
- starting with the
long anticipated 'sounding' (above).
.

This
is an earthquake for Kake fans, quite unlike anything that went
before and in it's way quite shocking. I suspect it is a genuine
first in gay publishing possibly pre-dating the milestone 1974 S&M
video 'Born
to Raise Hell'. The sudden revelation of Tom's deep knowledge of
such things must have disturbed some and enraptured others.

It's not
clear how great his interest was in dungeon scenes, his biographers
give little away in this area, but you can tell from tit bits in
other early drawings (which I will come back too) that he was
interested in erotic sadism. However, he did not return to the
dungeon subject in the Kake series, nor did he bother to develop more
polished versions of the imagery, commercial considerations may have
played a part in this.

There are few dungeon-like scenes in his later
work but his lasting interest was shown in 1989, two years before his death, when he produced a dramatic picture
showing a uniformed guard whipping the bare back of a chained
prisoner in a dark, stone cell*.
It's drawn in a fluid style with
crayons and quite unlike his earlier work.

*See
Tom of Finland retrospective III, p174

Kake Rides The Saddle
This is the nearest Tom gets to a 'riding the wedge' scenario (see labels at foot of this post for others). I'm
not a big fan of simultaneous multiple tortures (like these examples byTagame), but Tom's approach is at least progressive
and he does not jump straight to the end result. In 'Raunchy
Truckers' he shows the progressive disrobing and invasion of the
confused hitcher, not instant nudity and penetration. The journey is
as important as the destination. Here too he shows the stripping,
restraining and application of each new torment to Kake's
body gradually
- at least he tries to, but 20 pages is not nearly enough.

The
drawing here is not his best but nevertheless this work is still something
of a tour-de-force. Producing it was swashbuckling adventurism worthy
of Kake himself and you have to wonder how much of Tom's character is
reflected in his hero.

Policeman Home Alone

Kake
15 is equally controversial in it's own way as a policeman home after work opens his front door in his underwear to
find an armed man menacing him. Neither man appears to be Kake. The invader has a sinister appearance with long hair and a droopy
moustache. The policeman is a muscular man with blond hair, suggesting
purity perhaps but in virtually every other Kake story blond hair
signifies desirability and ultimately submissiveness and
passivity.
.

Humbled Cop
The
cop is groped and forced to pleasure his attacker (above) before being cuffed
to his own bed. As he gives up his ass to the intruder in a rough reworking of the Kake-1 scenario, Tom pans back ironically
to reveal his discarded police trousers and boots and a row of
body-building trophies on the side-unit, symbols of his authority and
physical strength, which avail him of naught at this moment.
.

There's
no pretence of consensus in this story, unless you cite the
policeman's sexual response to the attack on him. The two men could
be engaged in a rough role play, but there's no explanatory, rueful
smiles to be seen. Superficially it reads like a man acting on a
grudge or a sexual predator with a more aggressive disposition than
Kake himself.

With
these two episodes, the hard edge to Tom's work becomes glaringly
obvious and fetish enthusiasts will love it. Dennis Forbes writes in
the first Tom of Finland retrospective volume 1:- “...there is
nothing mean spirited or sinister about a Tom fantasy”.

Perhaps
he never read Kake 15. It is sinister, but that quality does not derive from
meanness of spirit, but from having experienced meanness of spirit.
The sort of meanness depicted so melodramatically by the Guardsmen in Kake 14. In
these two tales it's as though Tom has suddenly found the freedom to
vent some deeply held feelings and he deserves to be heard.

3 comments:

Thx Mitch for another penetrating(!)analysis of Kake in ToF. The 'Romancing the guards; story can hardly be in Central Europe,can it,before 1989.Its fascism and sadism(& US tourists) point to Central or S. America. And you are right about police activity: i had a mag. shipment from USA confiscated by Customs is police as late as about 1990.

Thanks for the comment, my guess about the location was based simply on the guards' uniforms and the ornate building they are guarding. I thought Tom was probably drawing on his general knowledge of Germany (including pre-war) and Scandinavia rather than depicting an exact location with the sadism as a pure fantasy add-on. The guards look too European to me for your Latin America option and I'd expect Tom to show something really stereotypical like a poncho or curly moustache if that was what he had in mind!

3/14/16 11:59p Tom of Finland Kake in CanadaKake is Sight Seeing In Canada those men are Mounties. I have the completed panels in one of Finland's books. I wish Finland had shown the Mountie getting spanked for getting aroused while on Duty by his superior. Another Mountie watched this and he got excited and joined in. Then he would chase Kake down pull his leather pants down and bare his ass for a fierce spanking. It was very arousing for the Mountie to see Kake take very close up Pics of the Mounties Basket and Butt. The Mountie got even with Kake. The Superior Mountie took the story into a foul direction. Kake was abused in the worst way. I didn't like it.

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Welcome to 'mitchmen' at blogger where Mitchell the gay fetish artist talks about his drawings and the erotic imagery that inspires them.
"I've been drawing since I was a teenager and it has always been an outlet for my innermost feelings and frustrations! My erotic art development was galvanised by the discovery of Tom of Finland's work and, inspired by the wealth of material on the internet, it continues to develop into diverse fetishes and occasionally gruesome interests!"